Let’s go downstairs and bake some cookies, like mother used to make. The warm smell sits right at home in your nostrils, invading them like wild ax-murderers hacking and slashing their way through endless miles of human bodies that stand in the way of their inhumane, carnal desires. Shhh, shhh, but that’s too dark. It’s Christmas after all. So let’s go downstairs and bake some cookies, like mother used to make.
One step… then two… Ooooohhhh, isn’t this great? You’ve never baked gingerbread cookies before, oh no, because you always thought that you would never be able to make them oh so good like mother used to. What did she say she made them with? Some kind of special ingredient. What was it? Was it sugar and spice and everything nice? Was it…love? That special ingredient that every mother cooks with because you are their extra special little kid?
Oh my, this is exciting! Your heart hammers against your ribcage as you set the oven to… Oh, you don’t know what to set the oven to, you’ve never made these before. Probably 300º will be good. You bend down, spin the dial. But what’s that? What the heck? There’s already a baking tray in there. You take it out, confused. On it, there’s a set of perfectly cut gingerbread men. They wear little black tuxedos with white buttons, their smiles expose endless rows of sharpened, white teeth, and their wide green eyes watch you intently with their white pupils. In the center, one of them stares right at you, holding a folded up note in its tiny dough hand. You snatch it from him, not caring about the little man’s feelings.
“To my little boy,
My oh my, I can’t believe how the years have passed! It seems like just yesterday that whatever secret deity governs this universe sent me to my untimely punishment beneath the Earth’s soil. I know, I was always so poetic, right? Now enjoy these cookies, I hope they taste just like how mommy used to make.
Love,
Mother”
Ding! Apparently ten minutes pass while you read that short letter, but to be fair you don’t read it once, do you now, you read it time after time until the words start doing tangos in your head as they spin spiderwebs around one another.
Now after it dings, you’re supposed to put the cookies back in and start the baking, Mother said.
How hot do you bake them? you asked.
Hot, very hot, Mother said.
But don’t they not like being so hot?
Oh, these little guys won’t mind at all, Mother said, She slid the tiny men into the three hundred degree heat chamber. She smiled. There was really nothing to it.
Nothing to it.
Well, there’s nothing to it, you think as you slide the baking tray in.
And as the minutes tick by, their faces change. No more are the artificial smiles plastered on by a woman who would ruthlessly murder them. Now are the faces of men who know their deaths are coming, smiles that slowly flatten in the corners as three minutes turn to four, five minutes to six, until the red frosting of their mouths fall clean off, and they can’t shout for help, just as you couldn’t call the ambulance when your – their? – mother started clutching her heart and breathing heavily minutes after she slid the baking tray filled with small people into the oven for the final time, yelling for you to get the phone, to get up, to do something and not just sit there as the people cooked in their torture chamber.
And then they come alive. One of them pokes its head up, its blank eyes staring into your heart. It’s lifeless, dull, unknowing of the infernal fire around it, like you on that fateful night, not knowing that mother will soon be gone for good. It looks at you, and then it stands on its two stubby legs, stumbling as it gets up. It walks to the edge of the baking tray, carefully navigating around its still dead – unconscious? – friends as they lie down, their backs against the aluminum’s sun-hot surface. It looks its friends in the eyes, and maybe it thinks “I’m sorry that I’m here and you’re not,” and then steps over the edge, falling down into the oven’s fiery, incomprehensible bottom.
Clunk.
Mother? you asked, your body shaking all over. Why was she on the ground? Why were her eyes closed? She may have been asleep for all you knew. Maybe she was. Maybe–
And then they all stand up. They look like an army, all dressed in their uniform suits. One of them peers down and looks at its friend, all dismembered and burned on the oven’s floor. It looks more like charcoal than a body. They form a single file line in the middle of the tray, a gingerbread snake if you will. And one by one, each of them takes turns taking suicidal leaps off the edge, and one by one you catch their faces as they take their fatefull falls.
“Stop crying, kid,” they all say. “Mother will be okay.”
Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.
The gingerbread charcoal pile grows and grows until it is a small mountain. In it, you see a face. Mother. And she smiles the gingerbread smile, looking at you, and you can’t tell if it is a smile of relief or a smile of scorn. But it doesn’t matter. Your mother’s smile is the thing you have always wanted the most, and if this was the way you got it then so be it. But that smile rang hollow, now devoid of any meaning, any life. An eternal reminder that mother is gone.
And who’s to blame for that?
And yet you bake those cookies every year, forgetting that you tried the year before because the waves of memory forces their dark underbellies to recede. And every year you hope that they taste like how mother used to make.
